Friday, November 22, 2013

"Google Scholar library is your personal collection of articles. You can save articles right off the search page, organize them by topic, and use the power of Scholar search to quickly find just the one you want "

Tuesday, October 22, 2013

Open Access Week "a global event now entering its sixth year, is an opportunity for the academic and research community to continue to learn about the potential benefits of Open Access, to share what they've learned with colleagues, and to help inspire wider participation in helping to make Open Access a new norm in scholarship and research."

Friday, October 18, 2013

Joshua Gans, chaired professor at the Rotman School of Management in Toronto questions whether changes to Harvard Business Review article fee policy should impact their participation to the FT's business school rankings.

While this is a long shot - FT has already said that they would keep HBR on the list of publications used for their ranking - the article raises good questions about access to research content.

Update: Librarians chime in via Chris Flegg's [Bodleian Business Librarian at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford] article in the Financial Times (Oct. 23, 2013):Access to research comes at a price

Friday, October 4, 2013

John Bohannon, journalist at Science, sent a fake research paper under a fake name to several open access peer review journals. He reports on the experiment in Science: Who's Afraid of Peer Review (INSEAD community only)

CREDIT: C. SMITH/SCIENCE

Unfortunately "Acceptance was the norm, not the exception. The paper was accepted by journals hosted by industry titans Sage and Elsevier. The paper was accepted by journals published by prestigious academic institutions such as Kobe University in Japan. It was accepted by scholarly society journals. It was even accepted by journals for which the paper's topic was utterly inappropriate, such as the Journal of Experimental & Clinical Assisted Reproduction."

Some critique the paper for lack if its own academic rigor in not using a control group of subscription based journals to compare the acceptance/rejection rate, read:

Thursday, September 12, 2013

A new alliance in the ever growing field of MOOCs was announced on the Google Research blog:
The platform mooc.org is set to go live in the first half of 2014.

Today, Google will begin working with edX as a contributor to the open source platform, Open edX. We are taking our learnings from Course Builder and applying them to Open edX to further innovate on an open source MOOC platform. We look forward to contributing to edX’s new site, MOOC.org, a new service for online learning which will allow any academic institution, business and individual to create and host online courses.

Thursday, July 25, 2013

'Scholar Metrics currently cover articles published between 2008 and 2012, both inclusive. The metrics are based on citations from all articles that were indexed in Google Scholar in July 2013. This also includes citations from articles that are not themselves covered by Scholar Metrics.'

"Suppressed titles were found to have anomalous citation patterns resulting in a significant distortion of the Journal Impact Factor, so that the rank does not accurately reflect the journal’s citation performance in the literature."

Monday, June 17, 2013

"The goal of re3data.org is to create a global registry of research data repositories. The registry will cover research data repositories from different academic disciplines. re3data.org will present repositories for the permanent storage and access of data sets to researchers, funding bodies, publishers and scholarly institutions. In the course of this mission re3data.org aims to promote a culture of sharing, increased access and better visibility of research data."

Friday, June 7, 2013

Ned Potter is an Academic Liaison Librarian at the University of York and has created this great Prezi to suggest 9 educational tools to be used in research or teaching by academic (including Prezi itself).

Tuesday, April 30, 2013

"...for the seventh time, we’re releasing new numbers showing requests from governments to remove content from our services. From July to December 2012, we received 2,285 government requests to remove 24,179 pieces of content—an increase from the 1,811 requests to remove 18,070 pieces of content that we received during the first half of 2012."

Tuesday, April 23, 2013

"Think of the most frustrating, intractable, or simply annoying problems you can imagine. Now think about what technology is doing to fix them. That’s what we did in coming up with our annual list of 10 Breakthrough Technologies. "

Friday, April 19, 2013

Launched on April 18, 2013 the Digital Public Library of America aims to "make the holdings of America’s research libraries, archives, and museums available to all Americans—and eventually to everyone in the world—online and free of charge" .

This ambitious and long time in the making project (see this post), is discussed at length by Robert Darnton, main leader of the initiative and Professor and University Librarian at Harvard, in this NY Review of Books article.

Thursday, February 21, 2013

Research universities are under growing pressure to play a more active, entrepreneurial role in commercial innovation. They increasingly regard tech transfer as a prerequisite for luring top faculty members and students, raising research funds, and potentially cashing in on lucrative inventions. But efforts to turn universities into commercial hothouses often don't succeed: Many advise schools to focus instead on "knowledge transfer"—helping society benefit from the discoveries and skills of faculty members and students without focusing just on finances.

Thursday, January 17, 2013

In the past few months, pricing of ebooks and issues of competition are coming into sharper focus. Changes are coming much faster in the publishing world today—prices for titles are dropping and we are seeing the development of new models and channels for publishing, distribution, and sales.

Tuesday, January 15, 2013

"How has publishing in top economics journals changed since 1970? Using a data set that combines information on all articles published in the top-5 journals from 1970 to 2012 with their Google Scholar citations, we identify nine key trends."

Monday, January 7, 2013

The Library of Congress has "an archive of approximately 170 billion tweets and growing. The volume of tweets the Library receives each day has grown from 140 million beginning in February 2011 to nearly half a billion tweets each day as of October 2012."

Click to view a a white paper [PDF] that summarizes the Library’s work to date and outlines present-day progress and challenges.